The Forgotten El Paso Airport With Ties to Chuck Norris and Racing History

Did you know El Paso used to have TWO airports? Our main El Paso International Airport that opened in 1928 & our old West Texas Airport (aka the Horizon Airport).

If you're unfamiliar on where the second airport was, it was located off of Loop 375, off of exit #42, east on Pellicano Drive & then turn on Aircoupe and you would get there. If you go on Google Maps, you can even find photos of the old sign that said "Horizon Airport" with an airport pointing in the direction to go.

Google Maps

A little background on the history of the Horizon Airport near El Paso

It was privately owned by the family of Phil Barrett's before his passing in 2008. It was also the former home to the El Paso Soaring Society (as this was noted on the Wayback Machine). The Horizon Airport was abandoned in 2014 & was torn down shortly afterwards.

Today there's a housing development over the area of the old Horizon Airport) located near Eastlake Middle School. But if you look at Google Earth's historical imagery, we can see what the airport looked like. For example take this 2011 photo:

Google Earth

There's also some footage of the airport being used in the 2000s like this video uploaded by ROBCOR10 & utubedan07. But what made this airport truly unique is that this airport is a movie star AND it had a 2nd life after the airport ceased operations.

The Horizon Airport was featured in the Chuck Norris film, Lone Wolf McQuade

Several scenes were shot in El Paso for the 1983 film, Lone Wolf McQuade, starring Chuck Norris; it even says so on the movie's official IMDB page. But you don't need IMDB to prove it; as you watch the movie, you can see that some of the scenes were indeed shot at the Horizon Airport, not the El Paso International airport. Like the scenes for Rawley's Airfield. There's also tours of Downtown El Paso that show various scenes that were shot around El Paso on YouTube, like this one from NEO Vision.

The Horizon Airport was also used as a drag strip before it was closed down

Yeah that long runway for take offs & landing seemed perfect to hold 1/4 mile races don't it? Well...a few years back, it WAS. Before the Horizon Airport was torn down, people would take their fined tuned-up rides and test to see how fast they could go. There are several other drag strips that El Paso misses; you can read about them here.

There's even more information regarding the history of the Horizon Airport thanks to the Airfields-Freeman website & Grokipedia. If you're interested in more airplane stories, you can read about the giant plane that's just on the other side of the border in Juarez that you can SEE from El Paso right here.

Get our free mobile app